GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2025/26

CHRIS WILLIAMS

‘All About Cindy’

MY BEST FRIEND’S NAME IS CINDY. Cindy is a lifestyle coach and was a child model and still does a bit of modelling, even though she’s forty-two and has three daughters. She is tall and slim with a blond choppy bob, high cheekbones and the yellow-flecked green eyes of a fox.

I hate Cindy.

If Cindy knew I hated her, this is what she would do. She would put down her coffee cup with a polite chink, nod slowly with that precision-moulded chin then push back her hair, turn on those eyes and say, it’s not about me, is it, Lauren? It’s about you, right? It’s about outsourcing the parts of yourself you’re not happy with because they’re fucking painful. I get it, hon. I know.

She would hug me till I’d finished crying, then laugh and say, ‘I’ll just send you the bill, shall I?’

We met when I broke my wrist at the climbing wall because I thought my epiphany might begin with climbing. I was zooming up the animal head holds of the first wall, marked Ages 6+, trying to ignore the blonde pre-teen and her mum who waited patiently at the bottom, when I saw, from the corner of my eye, a rabbit-sized roll of stomach fat bulging out between two straps of my harness. In an attempt to readjust, I lost my grip and swung from the auto-belay rope and smacked my wrist on a giraffe’s head. As I lay on the mat, blue and shivering, an angel with a choppy bob flew down. She took me to A&E and blagged me to the front, and by the time my wrist was better I’d had enough of climbing, so we now meet at the climbing centre café after her bouldering sessions. Because she is beautiful and successful and certain of her worth, I feel like I owe her my life, not just my wrist, and I insisted on buying coffee the first time and the second, and there never came a time when it felt right to stop insisting.

Beautiful women often fight to prove they’ve got a brain, while intelligent women fight to prove they’re sexy. Sometimes the two meet, and you get a woman with the house, the career, the handsome husband, the beautiful children. In mid-life, they realise they haven’t been living for themselves, so they go and open a snorkelling centre in Corfu, or a microbrewery on the Isle of Skye, or if you’re Cindy, switch from barrister to lifestyle coach.

Women like me do not get an epiphany.

Cindy presses a serviette to her lips, and with a breathy ‘Excuse me,’ struts away to the bathroom. I have no illusions about why she spends time with me. Any comparison will be good, whether it’s looks, intelligence or success. No one strives to become an overweight teaching assistant who wanted to be a real teacher because she loved kids but failed her A levels because she was pregnant then lost the baby and now lives in a rented basement flat with her security guard husband.

Cindy’s phone sits on the table, and on its screen sit Cindy, blonde and smiling, and her eleven-year old daughter, blonde and smiling. With their choppy bobs and full make-up and Cindy’s Botox and filler they almost look like sisters.

Cindy rarely talks about her two older daughters because men look at them before they look at her.

A couple of weekends ago I went on a yoga retreat in a huge old house in Totnes. Apart from a sixty-two-year old Bangladeshi postmaster and the yoga instructor, we were all women. Jet, the instructor resembled the hottest month of a firemen calendar and wore sleeveless t-shirts and black leggings and trotted out lines like, ‘we’ve all got a few rolls here and there,’ and ‘yoga doesn’t care what you look like’. There was a tall, slender woman in her forties called Mo, with big breasts and lips and a choppy bob like Cindy’s. Her trainers were a blinding white and I wondered if she scrubbed them with toothpaste. At night I could hear Jet’s grunts and Mo’s yelps and I liked to imagine her on top, slapping his face with every thrust.

A clique formed around Mo during the herbal tea breaks and vegan meals, while Jet would show his humility by sitting with one of the less attractive participants. On the Saturday night, he chose me. He was sweet, in an earnest, shy way and as we chatted about karmic soulmates, I imagined Mo giving him verbal and punching him.

The women in the Mo clique had arrived in Range Rovers and smelt of breath spray and expensive perfume and talked in private school accents about their fears for the environment and the unique troubles of their gifted but wayward children. If you tried to chat, they would spot something behind your shoulder, then glide towards it as though drawn by a magnet.

I saw these cliques as a teenager and I see them every year, in the classes I teach. The girl at the centre is the one everyone wants to be because she is beautiful. Beautiful and ruthless.

I tell Cindy about the yoga retreat, the hot fireman, the clique. I say they sounded like foxes mating, which is an exaggeration as you could only hear if you pressed your ear to the door. I say I confronted him and demanded a refund, which is not quite true. When I confronted him, his face went white and he said Mo was his fiancée and I apologised and offered him a Mentos Chewy Mint, which he declined.

Cindy puts down the cup of coffee I bought her, flashes those eyes and say she’s not religious. Then she tells me a long, tedious Bible story about a traveller asking a returning traveller what the people in the next town are like, and getting the answer ‘much like the people in the town you’ve come from’, the moral being that the townspeople are not the problem; you are, Lauren. She holds her phone in her left hand and as she talks, she and her daughter flash on and off.

When the parable is over, Cindy puts down her phone and scrapes her fork against her plate for the last bit of carrot cake icing – the carrot cake I’ve bought her – and pushes the tip of her perfect pink tongue through her perfect white teeth and I imagine her going down on her lawyer husband on an enormous bed, and at the moment he comes, she punches him in the face.

She runs a hand through her hair and laughs and says, ‘I’ll send you the bill, shall I?’

I often tell my husband Sam about Cindy. I do this when he’s playing a game on the TV with headphones on because that way I can keep myself entertained despite the gunfire. I once told her about him when he didn’t have his headphones on and he said she sounded like a dick.

The next time we meet at the climbing centre café, I decide to stand my ground because I’ve been watching videos on boundaries, and Cindy would say that to effect change, you make a plan and stick to the plan. As we wait for a woman clutching a rat-like dog to explain to the barista how to make kombucha, I say, ‘I think it’s your turn.’

Cindy thrusts her phone in my face with a picture of her in a red swimsuit by a pool, a cat on her lap. ‘He was from next door but just wouldn’t leave me alone!’

The cat and Cindy are distractingly cute but I stick to my guns. ‘I think it’s your turn,’ I stammer. The dog-woman is now explaining how you can only make kimchi with Korean cabbage, which is bullshit. Not that I’d ever make it, because it’s gross.

Cindy looks at me. ‘Sorry?’

I swallow. ‘I think it’s your turn to get the coffees.’

Cindy sweeps back her hair with both hands and bursts out laughing. With a tap on my forearm, she says, ‘You’re so deadpan, Lauren!’ then struts off to the loo while I get the coffees.

Between sips of latte, Cindy shows me photos from Bali. Her eleven-year old daughter sits on a moped in an alleyway while a couple of fat, seedy men look on. A middle-aged bar owner wanted to marry the poor girl, and Cindy finds this hilarious.

I am unable to follow the story of the charity ball with the Governor of Bali because I made a plan and did not stick to the plan. How can I be friends with this vain, self-obsessed woman who pimps out her daughter and always lets me pay; this beautiful, ruthless woman with emerald eyes and a choppy bob?

Cindy breaks off her story about a beach bar with a Komodo dragon on the counter and says, ‘You OK, Lauren?’

‘Fine. Why?’

‘Honey, you’re crying!’ She presses her cheek into mine and hugs me and I breathe in the warm, dark perfume of her body and hold her tight, because I am falling backwards into a bottomless pit. She tells me I’m the best and can do anything and just need to keep believing.

At school the next day, I print out an A4 picture of Cindy in high-res on the colour printer. I’m not allowed to print in colour so I use Sinéad’s login because Sinéad is too stressed to ever check. I show the picture to my hairdresser. He looks at the photo, looks at me, looks at the photo, frowns and says, ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

I don’t see Cindy for another three months because she’s on a ladies’ holiday in Thailand, then it’s the school holidays, then she cancels twice. I’ve seen photos of her ‘ladies’, and they’re like the Mo clique: sleek and burnished, the kind who live in massive houses with rich, cuff-linked husbands and beautiful, troubled children and have affairs with men who are poor, young and buff.

I have been texting Cindy to ask how she is and give her the opportunity to tell me how amazing the holiday was. She has shared photos of her and her ladies in pareos with flowers behind their ears at a waterfall, on horses led by a teenage boy, drinking cocktails at a beach bar, and I have responded with things like AMAZING!! and OMG I AM WELL JEL!!! and emojis of cocktails, smiling suns and palm trees. I haven’t bothered telling her what I’m up to because school-home-school is of no interest to anybody. Sam and I fought over his video games and I asked why he had so little ambition but he ignored the question so I took the controller and flushed it down the loo. He sat on the sofa in his monster feet slippers and his jim-jams and cried and I tried to hug him and tell him how amazing he was, like Cindy would have, but he called me a mad bitch and shut himself in the bathroom. The next day I bought him a new controller and he took it from me silently and started a game and that was that.

I have not sent Cindy a photo of my hair because I want it to really land. She will stop at a distance and say, ‘Oh my god,’ and clap a hand to her mouth, then scream and rush over and hug me and take a selfie of us with our choppy bobs and say why on earth have I never introduced you to my ladies?

Cindy can only do a Thursday morning so I phone in sick. I suggest we meet at the coffee shop in her co-working space because I want to be one of those brisk, confident, people who have their own company and make client calls and hold breakfast meetings in expensive, understated clothes and expensive, understated jewellery and sit on a dusky pink velvet banquette and drink speciality coffee from a handleless earthenware mug at a beaten copper table.

But Cindy says the coffee in the co-working space is terrible so we meet at a chain around the corner. She only has an hour and is twenty minutes late (So sorry! Snowed under!!! There in 5. Pls get my usual. Cxxxxx). Lateness usually annoys the fuck out of me but today the wait adds to the exhilaration.

When she walks through the door, everyone looks round. Her emerald green cotton tea dress hangs from her shoulders and emphasises the swell of her and keeps you guessing. Her hair is lighter and is shoulder-length, swept to one side. And although she’s my best friend and I see her all the time, my jaw drops and I wonder who the person was who thought they hated her.

‘Nice to see you, Lauren,’ she says, curtly, without kissing me. She’s busy and stressed, I get that. With friendship, you take the rough with the smooth. She dumps her laptop in its calfskin case on our table and takes a sip of coffee. ‘Oh, it’s a bit… Would you mind?’

I bring her a new coffee, plus a breakfast bran muffin. ‘Breakfast meeting!’ I say, with a giggle.

She declines the muffin so I put it in my bag for later. ‘New look,’ she says.

‘You too.’

She runs her fingers through her hair and I wonder how it would feel against my fingertips. This woman is queen of me. I take a selfie of us, so I can put the emerald dress into an image search later.

‘Look, Lauren,’ she says. ‘I’m really sorry but I’m afraid I can’t…’

But what I have is too big. ‘Thank you so much,’ I say. Tears spring to my eyes as something that has lain hidden for years comes to the surface.

She puts down her cup. ‘What for?’

‘Last time.’

‘Last time…?’

‘The advice you gave me.’

‘Oh, the advice!’ she says, although she clearly doesn’t remember. I am good at spotting a liar. This is why Sam and I so often argue.

‘You told me I could do anything I wanted.’

It feels as though everyone in the cafe is looking at us, although when I look around, no one is. Behind us sits a bald middle-aged man in a donkey jacket, reading one of those free local magazines that tell you about mother-toddler yoga groups and the new dog poo bins in the park. He is just the kind of person I would expect to be staring at Cindy and I am offended that he’s not.

Cindy shifts in her seat.

‘You’re just so amazing.’ I did not plan to say this. I planned to tell her I’ve applied for a support role in the school’s SEND unit, even though I’m unlikely to get it because Sinéad is doing the interviews. ‘You’re such an inspiration.’ Someone has taken control of my mouth and is doing dangerous things with it. ‘I’m going to leave my husband.’

‘Your husband?’

‘Sam.’

‘Oh!’ She laughs. ‘I always thought Sam was your girlfriend.’

Although I love Cindy, sometimes she can be annoying. ‘Why would you think that?’

She shrugs. Then she shivers, as though a ghost has passed through her, and tilts her head. ‘Has he been abusive, hon?’

Her face is so full of kindness, so full of concern that I say, ‘Yes.’

She comes and sits next to me on the sticky vinyl seat and I lean into her and cry on her shoulder. It feels good to cry.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’

I blow my nose with the tissue she gives me. ‘I was playing a video game the other day.’ She nods, unsurprised that I apparently have such an unsexy hobby. ‘And Sam came in and told me I’m not ambitious enough and he… he wrenched the controller out of my hands and flushed it down the toilet.’

‘Oh my god!’ Cindy claps a hand to her mouth. ‘That’s completely psycho!’

‘And I was so scared, I locked myself in the bathroom. And when I came out he… he hit me.’ The idea of Sam doing this is so upsetting that the tears flow freely.

‘I’m so sorry, hon. If you need a place to stay…’

We sit huddled together for a long, long time.

When I get home, Sam is playing Call of Duty with his headphones on. There’s a can of lager on the coffee table and the air is sticky with the odour of supermarket pizza.

He smiles at me, presses pause and takes off his headphones. On a burnt-out street, a gunman aims at a soldier, the bullet stuck in mid-air. ‘I’ve put a meat feast and a tray of potato waffles in. There’s a chocolate trifle and some Prosecco in the fridge. We could do with a treat.’

According to Rightmove, the value of Cindy’s house is £1.7m and our entire flat would fit in her kitchen/breakfast room.

I tell Sam, in the kindest way possible, that it’s not working. He cries. I feel desperately sad for him, in his jim-jams and monster feet. But he will never have ambition, and this will always hold me back.

He follows me to the bedroom where I throw some things in a bag.

‘Laur, let’s talk this through. Please.’ His voice veers towards hysterical.

‘This is not about me, is it?’ I say. ‘It’s about you, right?’

‘Laur, you’re making absolutely no sense.’ In a low voice, he says, ‘Should I phone someone?’

I push him on the chest with both hands. ‘I will not let you gaslight me.’ He stumbles and hits the side of his head on the bed frame. There is blood but he’s not really hurt. As I leave the flat, he calls out, ‘See you in a couple of weeks when you’ve calmed down.’

On the bus, I do an image search of the emerald dress. It costs £495, which means I will have to order it and report the parcel as stolen. I will grow out the choppy bob.

The door is opened by a teenage goth in a black hoodie and tiny shorts, who is a taller, thinner version of Cindy. She cuts her eyes at me, sighs and walks away. From the back of the house comes the sound of a dog barking and a door slamming. A couple of minutes later, Cindy appears, in jewel-studded mules and a silver velours tracksuit that makes her tan shine.

‘Lauren?’ She raises a finger to her collarbone.

‘You said I could…’

‘Of course, of course,’ she says, as if finally remembering who I am. Glancing over my shoulder, she ushers me into my new home.

The non-verbal teenager shows me to a small room next to the master bedroom, with a single bed and a stripy carpet. On an antique dressing table sits a dish of M&Ms. I eat them all except the yellow ones.

I wake at 2 A.M. to squeaking coming through the wall. I get out of bed and tiptoe across the parquet towards Cindy and Otis’s room.

I can hear them without the need to press my ear to the door: Cindy’s low moans, her husband’s grunts. I imagine Cindy on top, glistening like a race horse, her hair tickling his nose. She spits on him, slaps him; one cheek, then the other. I see myself next to her, lips pressed to hers, my fists pummelling his face.

I grip the door handle and press down.

It’s locked.

I knock.

The moaning and the grunting and the squeaking continue.

I knock more loudly. The sound intensifies. I knock again, and continue to knock. I pummel the door with both hands but still it does not open.

When I get home the next day, Sam is on the sofa playing Call of Duty. He’s wearing his tartan jim-jams and a new red fleece dressing gown, and there’s a scab on his forehead, which I’ll ask about later. He drops the controller without pressing pause and jumps to his feet. ‘Oh, Lauren!’ he says. ‘Laur! Thank God!’ The man is an emotional wreck. It was cruel of me to leave him.

I let him put his arms around me and cry himself out. Then I make us a cup of tea and tell him all about Cindy.